Photo Credit: infocux Technologies/Flickr

It's sometimes challenging to know what exactly to do when you're trying to get your site ranked in the search engines. You'll hear a lot of advice, some of it actually good, but how do you know what to listen to and what not?

Unfortunately there's no easy answer. Most of the SEO advice you see comes with a price tag, that is, someone wishing to sell you something. SEO is one of those things that morph as time passes, and there's no certainty that what worked a year ago has any chance of doing anything for you now. Worse, it could hurt you.

So instead of raise the white flag of surrender, let's look at 5 SEO services we know no longer work, so you aren't tempted to spend any of your precious marketing budget on them.

5 SEO Services to Skip

1. Anything starting with Y – Specifically, Yelp, Yext and the YellowPages. We'll give Yahoo a pass for the time being. These companies all wish to help you get a more robust presence in local search, but the reality is they are having a tough time remaining legitimate themselves. Get listings and reviews the old fashioned way – earn them!

2. Avoid search engine submission services – You can do this on your own, and the thing is is you really don't need to. The search engines, especially Google, prefer to find your pages by themselves. Just focus on creating great content, and announcing it via your social media platforms, and the hard work is done. Not so hard, right, and it was free.

3. Don't spin your content and shoot it out all over the web – One time someone thought that since a little content was good, a lot would be better. Doesn't work that way. This was the basis for the recent Google Penguin update that purged the internet of many sites containing duplicate and spun content.

4. Don't build link farms – Farms are great, for food. Thinking you will game Google by building linkwheels and site pyramids is a fools game. This did work for a time, but that was a long time ago.

5. Don't buy links – Google knows if you purchase links, and the best you will achieve from that is that they won't do you any good; the worst, well, you won't be able to find your site in Google. Enough reason? Thought so.

Photo Credit: Aray Chen/Flickr

Some of the biggest complaints that marketers experience about Google Authorship is that it seems like communism, it sounds excellent on paper but truthfully, it doesn't do the job. The concept is great if you think of it: all you need to do is write down your name in your blog site bylines, link your site to your Google+ page, claim authorship then afterwards when your articles and blogs show up in the SERPs, your photo and name is right next to them.

Why is this so great? Well for one, you're using up more property on the SERP so you're hitting several of your competition below the fold. Two, people believe in writing even more when there is a face next to it. It's basic human nature, we connect to facial expressions because we subsequently see the humanity in the piece. This connects us more, which consequently makes us more ready for what the writer is trying to share.

In marketing terms, the lead is primed and consumer confidence is up.

Where Did Google Fail?

So, what's been the major problem? Well, because of the way that Google validates authorship (up till recently that is), you could basically claim authorship of anything, provided it's connected through your Google+ authorship account, in which is verified. So let's state that you really wanted to rank to your competition's content or keywords. All you have to do is copy their web content and connect it to your authorship and BAM, you rank.

As a matter of fact, you rank over them because you have brand new content. Duplicate content rules you say? Why, not really with Google Authorship! And there within lies snag. Websites have been getting plagiarised left and right simply to find that the taken content is being actually claimed by Google Authorship accounts of the stealers.

Of course, this is undeniably terrible and we've seen a lots of legit, authoritative websites' pre-authorship traffic drop because other sites were ripping their material and claiming it. Therefore, you can imagine why these kinds of websites have been doubtful about using Google Authorship (why buy into the program that is folding you over)?

Panda 4.0 to the Rescue?

But another thing strange began happening around May 17th (Panda's 4.0 upgrade was formally released May 20th, but all of us know about Google's “official” release dates). All of a sudden, about 3/4ths of all the pre-authorship traffic that had been shed as a result of plagiarised and then claimed content, reappeared. That denotes something really changed here, particularly that Google started paying interest to where genuine content came from and monitoring it in the Authorship feature.

This is excellent news for anyone that is an actual authority site as well as better news for those individuals of you on the internet that are creating original composition. Now is the right time to claim Google Authorship if you haven't already. It appears like the new Panda update has mended the article stealing and authorship-claiming concern that has pained the feature from beginning.

Good for Google and even better for you. Now those great advantages we were talking about (more property on the SERPs, sticking a face to the name and blog post, branding your own self as an authority, etc.) are totally within grasp. Just simply head on over to your Google+ account and start to launch your authorship. As always, it's an excellent concept to Google your blog post from time to time to see who might be cutting you off. While Panda might have your back now, there's always a sneakier animal in the jungle waiting to steal your content.